Grocery Stores

I was at a Caribou Coffee tonight, doing some homework. Then I was at a liquor store, purchasing a bottle of imported English ale. London Pride, if you must know. After that, I decided to come home. But I was suddenly stricken by the sight of a great spotlight in the sky...

Drawn like a moth, I drove over to the light and saw that it was promoting the GRAND OPENING of a brand new Rainbow grocery store. Seeing that I was done with homework (I don't have Civil Procedure tomorrow because it's Yom Kippur), I figured, what the hell, I'll go check out the new Rainbow. I couldn't help but think a bit about my grandpa, whose favourite thing to do in his last few years was to go to the "new" Rainbow in Bloomington. He could barely walk anywhere else (he weighed near 400 pounds), but you gave him a cart and a deli section and the dude just flew.

Just to clarify, the new Rainbow I went to looked nothing like the Rainbow in the photo above. Instead, it looked like a giant Northwoods hunting lodge, resplendent with pumpkins, Indian corn, and other autumnal decor. That sort of Minnesota-y looking building that all of us like to think we live in, or at least want to.

Now, you have to understand, I have a strange fascination with grocery stores. I don't know what it is, human frailty or a personal foible or whatever, but I could spend hours wandering around in grocery stores. There's something so bombastic about the sheer quantity of food available when you think about how some kid in Africa lives on a bowl of rice a week or something.

When you think about it, your typical American supermarket is probably the preeminent shrine to capitalistic excess. The coffee and tea aisle was ridiculous. And I mean, I love coffee as much as any self respecting organic Ecuadorian grower, but it seemed a bit out of control. Especially since half of the coffee was sludge like Sanka or industrial fire cans of Maxwell House. But seriously, I walked down a frozen foods aisle that consisted almost entirely of various forms of potatoes. Steak fries, shoestring fries, french fries, hash browns, little smiley face fries, waffle fries, home fries, mashed potatoes, crinkle fries, shredded hash browns, double baked potatoes, etc, etc, etc. I felt like I was walking through that scene in Forrest Gump where Bubba talks for days about the different ways to make shrimp. Compare that mile long frozen potato aisle with the actual potatoes being sold in the produce section. Amazing, simply amazing.

So anyways, I wandered around Rainbow for probably about 25 minutes or so in a daze, stupefied at the sheer quantity and variety that surrounded me. And a grocery store is basically a gigantic sensory overload. You have these relatively narrow aisles, crammed with shelf after shelf of different products, each screaming for your attention. People rushing everywhere like maniacs with large carts. Consistently faced with decisions of infinite possibility, like what sort of fried frozen potato to purchase. There are so many options that it's almost impossible to make a rational decision. Eventually, you get to the brink, where it's a choice between having a freakout and knocking everything over whilst screaming or just grabbing something and running like hell. Going to a grocery store has to be the suburban equivalent of smoking crack.

The other interesting part of a grocery store is the fact that it is a social melting pot. I mean, everyone needs to buy groceries, be they black, white, big, tall, whatever. It's too bad they don't have benches just to sit around and people watch, preferably with bench-side coffee service. Maybe some of those two-way mirrors or something. I was quite confused by the woman shopping who was decked out in St. Paul Co-op gear. Seemed like sort of a conflict of interest to me. There was this one dude who looked like the only reason he was there was to enter to win the camoflauged ATV. Without going into extensive detail, it's sufficient to say that a lot of people there confused me.

I thought my trip would have been simple enough, I just wanted to check out the place and maybe grab some salsa. But like I said, it ended up an ordeal. Everything about it was so insane. I suppose, all grocery stores are the same way, but still. When you think about what a grocery store is actually like, it's absolutely insane. Why the hell would you ever need a sub sandwich the size of a small nuclear weapon? It was unbelievable, simply unbelievable. Seriously, if you dropped this thing off a building, it probably would have cratered the sidewalk.

Anyways, in a flash of panic, I grabbed some queso dip, waited impatiently for the ignoramus ahead of me to operate the self check out with her 50 children in tow, paid with my Discover card (cashback bonus for groceries), and got the hell out of there.